More than 700 migrants drown in the Mediterranean trying to reach Europe

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More than 700 migrants trying to reach Europe are feared to have died in three Mediterranean Sea shipwrecks south of Italy over the past few days, the UN refugee agency said.

Carlotta Sami, spokeswoman for UNHCR, said Sunday that an estimated 100 people were missing from a smugglers’ boat which capsized Wednesday.

She said about 550 others are missing from a smuggling boat that capsized Thursday morning after leaving the western Libyan port of Sabratha a day earlier. She says refugees say that boat, which was carrying about 670 people, didn’t have an engine and was being towed by another packed smuggling boat before it capsized.

About 25 people from the capsized boat managed to reach the first boat and survive, 79 others from it were rescued by international patrol boats and 15 bodies were recovered.

In a third shipwreck on Friday, Sami says 135 people were rescued, 45 bodies were recovered and an unknown number of people many more, the migrants say are missing.

Survivors are being taken to the Italian ports of Taranto and Pozzallo. Sami says the U.N. agency is trying to gather information with sensitivity considering that most of the new arrivals are either shipwreck survivors themselves or traumatized by what they saw.

Italy’s southern islands are the main destinations for countless numbers of smuggling boats launched from the shores of lawless Libya each week packed with people seeking jobs and safety in Europe. Hundreds of migrants drown each year attempting the dangerous Mediterranean Sea crossing

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A heartbreaking picture has been released showing a drowned baby in the arms of a charity worker during a week in which 700 migrants were killed crossing the Mediterranean.

The child’s lifeless body was pulled from the sea on Friday off the south coast of Italy after the capsizing of a boat which had set off from Sabratha in Libya the night before.

German rescuers released the picture in a bid to persuade European authorities to ensure safe passage to migrants, after hundreds drowned in the Mediterranean in a matter of days.

The photograph shows the baby being cradled in the arms of a rescuer known only as Martin, who described how the ‘sun shone into its bright, motionless eyes’.

Forty-five bodies arrived in the southern Italian port of Reggio Calabria on Sunday aboard an Italian navy ship, which picked up 135 survivors from the same incident.

The humanitarian organisation Sea-Watch was operating a rescue boat in the sea between Libya and Italy when the picture was taken.

In an email, the rescuer, who gave his name as Martin but did not want his family name published, said he had spotted the baby in the water ‘like a doll, arms outstretched’.

‘I took hold of the forearm of the baby and pulled the light body protectively into my arms at once, as if it were still alive … It held out its arms with tiny fingers into the air, the sun shone into its bright, friendly but motionless eyes.’

The rescuer, a father of three and by profession a music therapist, added: ‘I began to sing to comfort myself and to give some kind of expression to this incomprehensible, heart-rending moment. Just six hours ago this child was alive.’

Like the photograph of the three-year-old Syrian boy Aylan lying lifeless on a Turkish beach last year, the image puts a human face on the more than 8,000 people who have died in the Mediterranean since the start of 2014.

Little is known about the child, who according to Sea-Watch was immediately handed over to the Italian navy.

Rescuers could not confirm whether the partially clothed infant was a boy or a girl and it is not known whether the child’s mother or father are among the survivors.

Sea-Watch collected about 25 other bodies, including another child, according to testimony from the crew seen by Reuters. The Sea-Watch team said it unanimously decided to publish the photo.

‘In the wake of the disastrous events it becomes obvious to the organizations on the ground that the calls by EU politicians to avoid further death at sea sum up to nothing more than lip service,’ Sea-Watch said in a statement in English distributed along with the photograph.

‘If we do not want to see such pictures we have to stop producing them,’ Sea-Watch said, calling for Europe to allow migrants safe and legal passage as a way of shutting down people smuggling and further tragedies.

At least 700 migrants may have died at sea this past week in the busiest week of migrant crossings from Libya towards Italy this year, the UN Refugee agency said on Sunday.

The boat carrying the baby left the shores of Libya near Sabratha late on Thursday, and then began to take on water, according to accounts by survivors collected by Save the Children on Sunday. Hundreds were on board when it capsized, the surivors said.

It comes after it emerged that a woman migrant was decapitated in a horrific accident as a boat carrying 500 people started to sink in the Mediterranean.

The vessel, which had no engine, was being towed by another smuggling boat – also with hundreds on board – when it started to take on water off the south coast of Italy on Thursday.

Survivors of the disaster, which claimed more than 500 lives, have told of horrific scenes as refugees started to panic and jump into the sea.

Others told how the Sudanese captain of the first boat then cut the tow rope which snapped back and decapitated a woman – though it is not clear which of the two boats she was on.

The second boat quickly sank, taking those packed tightly into the hold down with it.

Hundreds drowned between Wednesday and Friday when their boats all overturned off southern Italy, according to the UN refugee agency.

Describing Thursday’s shipwreck, Carlotta Sami, the spokeswoman for the UN’s refugee agency UNHRC, said: ‘We’ll never know the exact number, we’ll never know their identity, but survivors tell that over 500 human beings died.’

Giovanna Di Benedetto, Save the Children’s spokesperson in Sicily, told AFP it was impossible to verify the numbers involved but survivors of Thursday’s wreck spoke of around 1,100 people setting out from Libya on Wednesday in two fishing boats and a dinghy.

‘The first boat, carrying some 500 people, was reportedly towing the second, which was carrying another 500. But the second boat began to sink. Some people tried to swim to the first boat, others held onto the rope linking the vessels,’ she said.

The Sudanese captain was arrested on his arrival in Pozzallo along with three other suspected people traffickers, Italian media reports said.

‘We tried everything to stop the water, to bail it out of the boat,’ a Nigerian girl told cultural mediators, according to La Stampa daily.

‘We used our hands, plastic glasses. For two hours we fought against the water but it was useless. It began to flood the boat, and those below deck had no chance. Women, men, children, many children, were trapped, and drowned,’ she said.

One survivor from Eritrea, 21-year-old Filmon Selomon, told The Associated Press that water started seeping into the second boat after three hours of navigation, and that the migrants tried vainly to get the water out of the sinking boat.

‘It was very hard because the water was coming from everywhere. We tried for six hours after which we said it was not possible anymore,’ he said through an interpreter.

He jumped into the water and swam to the other boat before the tow line on the navigable boat was cut to prevent it from sinking when the other went down.

A 17-year-old Eritrean, Mohammed Ali Imam, who arrived five days ago in another rescue, said one of the survivors told him that the second boat started taking on water when the first boat ran out of fuel.

In 2014 and 2015, more than 320,000 boat migrants arrived on Italian shores, and an estimated 7,000 died in the Mediterranean as they sought to reach Europe, according to the International Organization for Migration.

Before today’s estimate that 700 may have died this week, the IOM previously believed about 1,200 had died so far this year. Last year 4,000 migrants died in the Mediterranean.

Those who survived told mediators the dead included ‘around 40 children, including many newborns’, La Repubblica daily said.

‘I saw my mother and 11-year old sister die,’ Kidane from Eritrea, 13, told the aid organisations. ‘There were bodies everywhere’.

Just 25 people survived the Thursday’s disaster – 79 others were rescued by patrol boats and 15 bodies were recovered.

Carlotta Sami, spokeswoman for UNHCR, added that an estimated 100 people are still missing from a smugglers’ boat that was lost on Wednesday.

Sami said 45 more bodies were recovered from a shipwreck Friday and many more are reported missing.

A bout of good weather as summer arrives has kicked off a fresh stream of boats attempting to make the perilous crossing from Libya to Italy.

Italian news agency Ansa said some 70 dinghies and 10 boats had set off over the past week – more than 15 a day.

Italy’s Interior Minister Angelino Alfano said Saturday that Europe needed ‘a quick agreement with Libya and African countries’ to halt the crisis.

The chaos in the North African country since Muammar Gaddafi’s fall in 2011 has been exploited by people traffickers.

Migrants interviewed by La Repubblica in Sicily told the daily a new ‘head trafficker’ called Osama had taken control of departures from Libya’s beaches and was offering ‘cut-price’ deals of 400 euros for the boat journey to lure in new customers.

‘I was held captive for six months in a basement of an abandoned building in Sabratha. I saw many people executed, those who tried to escape were killed by the guards, who were all Libyans,’ a Nigerian migrant told the newspaper.

European Parliament President Martin Schulz said in an interview with the Italian daily on Sunday that Italy’s ‘migration compact’ idea was ‘the best proposal so far’ for stopping the boat crossings and preventing deaths.

Italy wants to persuade African countries to help close migrant routes to Europe and take back some of those arriving via Libya in exchange for increased aid and investment.

Germany has made it clear, however, that it is against one of the elements of Italy’s plan: the issuing of EU-Africa bonds to finance it.

It comes after it emerged that 668 migrants were saved from boats in distress in the Mediterranean off Libya on Saturday.

They were rescued by Italian coast guard and navy ships, aided by Irish and German vessels and humanitarian organisations, Italian and Irish officials said.

The rescues are the latest by a multi-national patrol south of Sicily that has saved thousands this week.

The Irish military said the vessel Le Roisin, deployed earlier this month in the humanitarian search and rescue mission, saved 123 migrants from a 12-metre-long dinghy and recovered a male body.

A German ship, part of the EU Navfor Med deployment on patrol for migrant smugglers’ boats, was also involved in what was a total of four separate rescue operations, the Italian coast guard said.

Meanwhile, with migrant shelters filling up in Sicily, the Italian navy vessel Vega headed toward Reggio Calabria, a southern Italian mainland port, taking 135 survivors, along with 45 bodies, from a rescue a day earlier. The Vega was due to dock on Sunday.

Under a European Union deal, tens of thousands of those rescued at sea and seeking asylum were supposed to be relocated to other EU nations from Italy and Greece, whose shores have received most of the migrants in recent years.

But with resentment building in some European countries about taking in migrants, the plan never really took off, and only a small percentage have actually been moved.

At the Vatican on Saturday, Pope Francis told several hundred children, among them many migrants, who came from the Italian south to see him, that migrants ‘aren’t a danger but they are in danger’.

The pontiff held a red life vest, given to him recently by a volunteer, and told the children it was the vest used by a Syrian girl who died while trying to reach the Greek island of Lesbos. ‘She’s in heaven, she’s watching us,’ Francis told his young audience.

Among those in the audience was a Nigerian youth, who lost his parents in 2014 as the family tried to reach Italy by sea.

Francis has repeatedly expressed dismay that some European nations have refused to accept migrants fleeing poverty or war, and have even thrown up fences and other barriers to thwart the arrivals from journeying northward after reaching the continent’s southern shores.

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